Imagine a tool where you could ask how you would have performed if you had invested $300 per month in bitcoin for the past 1.5 or 2.5 years. Well now there is an easy way to do it. Check out this website:

Townes wrote:Over twice the value of gold (nearly 3 X) Too late to get in now?

Here is my position on this. It depends on your time horizon, goals and risk tolerance.

For any given 18 month period in the life of bitcoin, if you had used this X dollars per month strategy and held, you would at least be breaking even... and that is worst case scenario, i.e. buying at the very top of the bubble in late 2013 and continuing to buy during the slow collapse. Starting in 2014, that shortens to any 6 month period. And we all know the potential upside, but I'm just highlighting the downside here.

Now I doubt that bitcoin will hit $500,000 in 3 years like Jon McAfee thinks, but $10,000 is realistic IMHO. Along the way you will see drops. Bitcoin could go below $2,000 again. If/when that happens, the long terms guys on here will be buying, and the short term guys not used to the volatility will panic sell. So you just need to determine which camp you are in and act accordingly.

Everybody who enters into crypto thinks they are too late since 2011. EVERYBODY. In 2013 I thought I was too late. Long John thought he was too late 2 months ago. In 2 years, somebody else is going to be asking about crypto for the first time and that first post is going to say, "I know I already missed the boat on crypto, but". This will finally end when all new users are kids becoming adults and their only excuse was they weren't born yet.

Perhaps. But as I tell my kids, a smart person learns from their mistakes, a wise person learns from the mistakes of others. This tool gives a very easy to use visualization of what historically can be done. People might read about all the crypto threads and think it seems too hard or confusing to be an early adopter in this crypto space, but the reality is just the opposite. Creating a Coinbase account is less work than opening a bank account at Wells Fargo (which takes mounds of paperwork and over an hour the last time I tried it). You can then set up an automated payment into bitcoin and hold in Coinbase's "vault" or your own hardware wallet (preferred). It isn't that hard.

So if a person can easily see the overall performance, maybe they can learn from history and benefit. Again, bitcoin isn't necessarily meant to be an investment, as per Satoshi's original vision, but until mass adoption occurs, the price will continue to climb relative to fiat currencies.

I'm not into torturing myself. I know full well I would be better off if I'd been in Bitcoin from the beginning and put a few thousand dollars into it at that time. Damn, there I went and tortured myself.

xelint wrote:Does it calculate how much you would have lost in the Mt. Gox fraud

It sure does, if you want to go that route. So let's say you were wise enough to see the opportunity of bitcoin early on, and starting buying earlier than almost everybody... 01JAN12, purchasing $300 per month and holding. Unfortunately you weren't wise enough to hold your own bitcoins, and you stored 100% of your stash on Mt.Gox.

Between 01JAN12 and the collapse where you lost everything in FEB 2014, you would have spent $7,800, and had 597 bitcoins. And you lost it all. Learning from your mistake, you continue to put the same $300 into bitcoin, and then hold it yourself until today. Now your $$$ spent increases to a total of $20,400 (which includes your sunk $7,800), and you would now have 28.84 bitcoins worth $78,914. So even after losing everything after 2 years and 2 months of initial smart investing, you would still have more than tripled your money (nearly 4x).

Of course, if you only had 50% of your funds on Mt.Gox then you would have over 300 bitcoins today. I'll let you do the math.

SilverDoge wrote:Now I doubt that bitcoin will hit $500,000 in 3 years like Jon McAfee thinks, but $10,000 is realistic IMHO. Along the way you will see drops. Bitcoin could go below $2,000 again. If/when that happens, the long terms guys on here will be buying, and the short term guys not used to the volatility will panic sell. So you just need to determine which camp you are in and act accordingly.